Recently I have started going raw dog on my databases . I think I love it. Let me explain. TL;DR; After 25+ years championing ORMs, I’ve switched to raw database queries paired with Python dataclasses. I’m calling it the Raw+DC pattern . The result: better AI coding assistance, fewer aging dependencies, comparable or better performance, and type safety where it counts. ORM/ODM Raw+DC Pattern Type safet...

That expectation is linear is one of my favourite facts. I got a first taste of this when I was doing an internship at an unnamed trading firm. Some guy was teaching me the basics of trading and showing me how traders (of which I was not one) were expected to have heuristics that would allow them to make snap judgments about things like expectation. As an example, he asked me, in more words, what the expected rank when flipping over the top card of a deck of cards was (A=1, J=11, Q=12, K=13). ...

Sometimes you need more than a Recovery Kit Nano, more than the Recovery Quick Kit , and even more than the Recovery Kit 2 . What started as a project to get a 19" rack into a Pelican 1607 Air ended up with a very modular, very DIY, and very over-the-top PC build. The series of Recovery Kits started in 2019 for me, with some of my earliest projects going back even earlier. Each Recovery Kit until now has been based on a Raspberry Pi, the little board that has powered so many cyberdecks . ...

I recently claimed a rebate for installing an electric vehicle (EV) charger, only to discover that Eversource, my power supplier, was publicly exposing personal information of customers who applied, including: Full names Vehicle registration certificates (including plate number and vehicle identification number) Home addresses Email addresses Phone numbers I’ll include the backstory that led me to the vulnerability, but if you just want to know about the security vulnerability,...

A tribute before we begin: I’m saddened to share that we have lost a pioneering international lunar collaboration diplomat in Steve Durst [1943-2026]. As the lead & founder of the US-based non-profit International Lunar Observatory Association ( ILOA ) and Space Age Publishing , Steve forged unique relationships across and between the US, China, India, Europe, and Canada against many odds. Perhaps as a fitting tribute to Steve, ILOA’s ILO-C telescope  is slated to be onboard China’s ...

Last week I hinted at a demo I had seen from a team implementing what Dan Shapiro called the Dark Factory level of AI adoption, where no human even looks at the code the coding agents are producing. That team was part of StrongDM, and they've just shared the first public description of how they are working in Software Factories and the Agentic Moment : We built a Software Factory : non-interactive development where specs + scenarios drive agents that write code, run harnesses, and conv...

It has been 104 days since I was laid off. In that time I have written approximately 64,000 words, of which 75% has been fiction and 25% non-fiction. (These figures don’t include email or social media.) I’ve actually written on all but 30 of those 104 days; at 71%, that puts me a little short of my 75% target but slightly ahead of the 65% of days I’ve managed over the past year. As for time, I’m averaging about 5 hours a day of trackable activity, which includes exercise, music practic...

In October, my Dad and I got to go behind the scenes at two St. Louis Blues (NHL hockey) games, and observe the massive team effort involved in putting together a modern digital sports broadcast. I wanted to explore the timing and digital side of a modern SMPTE 2110 mobile unit, and my Dad has been involved in studio and live broadcast for decades, so he enjoyed the experience as the engineer not on duty! In October, my Dad and I got to go behind the scenes at two St. Louis Blues (NH...

I needed a palette cleanser after the last few days. So when I saw James and Zachary Kai ’s posts about this important topic, I felt compelled to respond in kind. How many sandwiches do you eat per week? At least a few when we’re at home. I used to eat them more often. I miss them. I should eat more of them. That was a lot of sentences. When do you eat sandwiches? Sandwiches are the perfect late brunch and lunch food. What’s your go-to sandwich order? Where do I even start!?...

“Home is behind, the world ahead and there are many paths to tread, through shadows to the edge of night, until the stars are all alight.” ― The Lord of the Rings My journey began with a few obstacles. After boarding the plane to Qatar, it took more than three hours for the departure. First, we went for the mandatory de-icing. Then, there was a medical emergency on board, which took so long that a second de-icing was necessary. Safety goes first, and it was all beyond control, but ...

The Japanese are really good at woodworking. And I love watching the Yankee workshop, my dad makes Native American bows and arrows completely from scratch in his workshop with trees that he finds.  This is all different from the stuff you get at IKEA, but I’ve been coding now for money for 35 years and systems are still complicated, computers still do dumb stuff, humans still do dumb stuff, this is just like the move from assembler to C, like the introduction of syntax highlighting, the intro...

I read this post on Manu's blog and it immediately resonated. I've been spending more time than I'd like to admit staring at my phone recently, and most of that consists of a stupid game, or YouTube shorts. Manu said: If you also want to cut down on some of your phone usage, feel free to join in; I’ll be happy to include links to your posts. As a benchmark, my screen time this week averaged around 2.5 hours per day on my phone and 1.5 hours per day on my tablet. That's bloody embar...

(I thought I had already posted this but the blogger system we use says I didn't. Apologies if I did. Most likely is that I posted something similar. When you blog for X years you forget what you've already blogged on.)  Historians who study ancient Greece often have to work with fragments of text or just a few pottery shards. Nowadays we preserve so much that historians 1000 years from now will have an easier time. Indeed, they may have too much to look at; and have to sort through news, fake ...

It’s been a long time since we plucked my magic twanger, I know. No, I have not forgotten how to blog.  I just haven’t had the time, or the energy.  Too much else to do, too many projects, too many deadlines, and I was behind on everything.   Too much death as well; we lost some close friends during the last few months, along with artists, writers, and other celebrities whose work meant a lot to us, even if we did not know them personally.  I wanted to talk about all of that. Oh, an...

I was chatting with Kevin earlier today, and since he’s unhappy with his mindless phone usage , I proposed a challenge to him: for the next 4 weeks, each Sunday, we’re gonna publish screenshots of our screen time usage as well as some reflections and notes on how the week went. If you also want to cut down on some of your phone usage, feel free to join in; I’ll be happy to include links to your posts. I experimented with phone usage in the past and I know that I can push screen time usa...

Books to be destructively scanned by Anthropic, via the Washington Post . Welcome to the reading list, a look at what happened this week in infrastructure, buildings, and building things. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items: No essay this week, but I’m working on a longer essay about US construction productivity that should be out next week. Sending the reading list a day early this week. Housing Goldman Sachs has a ...

Some more thoughts from last week’s open space gathering on the future of software development in the age of AI. I haven’t attributed any comments since we were operating under the Chatham House Rule , but should the sources recognize themselves and would like to be attributed, then get in touch and I’ll edit this post.  ❄                ❄ During the opening of the gathering, I commented that I was naturally skeptical of the value of LLMs. After all, the decades...

Real estate agents will tell you that a home’s most important feature is “location, location, location.” It’s similar in neuroscience: “Location is everything in the brain,” said Bosiljka Tasic, a self-described “biological cartographer.” Brain injury in one spot could knock out memory; damage in another could interfere with personality. Neuroscientists and doctors are lost without a good map. Source Real estate agents will tell you that a home’s most important feature is ...

Last year I first started thinking about what the future of programming languages might look like now that agentic engineering is a growing thing. Initially I felt that the enormous corpus of pre-existing code would cement existing languages in place but now I’m starting to think the opposite is true. Here I want to outline my thinking on why we are going to see more new programming languages and why there is quite a bit of space for interesting innovation. And just in case someone wants to s...

When programming, we chain functions together. Function A calls function B. And so forth. You do not have to program this way, you could write an entire program using a single function. It would be a fun exercise to write a non-trivial program using a single function… as long as you delegate the code writing to AI because human beings quickly struggle with long functions. A key compiler optimization is ‘inlining’: the compiler takes your function definition and it tries to substitute i...

The way I see it, few parts of American life are as quintessentially American as buying gas. We love our cars, we love our oil, and an industry about as old as automobiles themselves has developed a highly consistent, fully automated, and fairly user friendly system for filling the former with the latter. I grew up in Oregon. While these rules have since been relaxed, many know Oregon for its long identity as one of two states where you cannot pump your own gas (the other being New Jersey). In...

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There was recently an attempt by an independent journalist to expose fraud in a Minnesota social program. It was deeply frustrating; the journalist had notably poor epistemic standards, which secondary media seized upon to dismiss their result. The class-based sniffing almost invariably noted that prestige media had already reported stories which rhymed with the core allegation, while sometimes implying that makes the allegations less likely to be true, through a logical pathway which is mys...